Southern Sudan Challenges

Portraits, third prize singles

December 1, 2010

Akkach, South Sudan

A Dinka man stands in front of his house in Akkach, South Sudan. The Dinka, the largest ethnic group in region, are an agro-pastoral people who migrate according to season. At the onset of the rainy season in May or June, they move to settlements of huts built from mud and thatch above the flood level, where they plant crops. During the dry months, beginning around December, they leave for better grazing grounds in the lowlands, living in semi-permanent shelters. Between 1983 and 2005, the people of South Sudan were embroiled in a bitter civil war with the largely Muslim government in the north, which cost some 1.5 million lives. In January of 2011, a referendum among southerners, promised as part of a peace deal, resulted in a nearly unanimous vote for independence.

Guillem Valle speaks about the project:
"I was doing a story in Southern Sudan before the referendum for independence in collaboration with the NGO Intermon-Oxfam. They allowed me to spend several days photographing their projects on the field. For some days I tried to capture the daily life in this place that has suffered one of the deadliest wars the African continent has ever known. One day I visited a village in a very remote area where I met the man in the photograph. This ethnic Dinka elder spent the entire day with us, showing us the village and explaining their daily life there. I noticed his hieratic face and I thought that a portrait of him could summarize many of the things he had been explaining."

Guillem Valle

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About the photographer

Guillem Valle

Guillem Valle first became interested in documentary photography in 1998, when, at the age of 14, he traveled to Sarajevo on an art-student exchange program. Finding himself with a borrowed camera in the middle of a war-torn city, he began to intuit how powerful photography could not only be a visual language, but a document too. At the age of 16, he started work as a freelance photographer, mainly for local newspapers. While a student at the Institut d'Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya, he traveled on two occasions between 2002 and 2003 to photograph the Palestinian Intifada. Valle started work with El País in 2003, all the while maintaining a personal agenda, developing a body of documentary work on social movements in Barcelona. Over these years, he has worked on such stories as Kosovo's independence, the Uygur minority in Western China, PKK fighters in the mountains of Northern Iraq, the war in Lebanon, and gold mines in Congo, among others. He is currently based in Bangkok, working on issues around South East Asia.